Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas explored in HG Wells' novella, published in 1895, in which the Time Traveller moves forward to 802,701 AD. There he finds humanity has evolved into the Eloi and Morlocks, where the Eloi are small but leisured fruitarians and the Morlocks live below ground, carry out the work and have a different diet. Escaping the Morlocks, he travels millions of years into the future, where the environment no longer supports humanity.
29 October 2019
Pindex: Will Quantum Computers & AI Help You Live To 200?
How Quantum AI could help you live to 200, like a bowhead whale.Google's quantum supremacy news opens exciting doors. A quantum computer completed a task in 200 seconds that would take 10,000 years on today's fastest supercomputer.We explore the special connection between quantum computers and AI. Together, they will change everything.
Politico: Far left and right outflank center in regional German vote
The far-left Die Linke party largely held steady to secure first place at 31 percent of the vote in the state of Thuringia, thanks in part to the popularity of state premier Bodo Ramelow, according to preliminary results. Meanwhile, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) once again demonstrated its strong support in the east of the country by surging ahead to finish second at 23.4 percent, more than doubling its vote share in the last election of 2014. [...]
The ballot in the state of a little more than 2 million is expected to have limited impact at national level as Thuringia is a rural region of small towns rather than teeming metropolises. However, the result means efforts to build a coalition will be fraught, testing party red lines. The prior coalition made up of Die Linke, the SPD and the Greens now falls short of a majority. [...]
All parties have ruled out working with the AfD. Its regional leader, Björn Höcke, is a right-wing firebrand whose controversial statements about the Nazi era have prompted some within the party to try to oust him from its ranks.
Politico: Is the clock change worth it?
The outgoing European Commission president last year promised that spring 2019 would be the last time the whole of Europe would have to alter their watches for the bi-annual time change. But now the soonest countries will get around to deciding whether to scrap the change will be 2021, after some capitals complained Juncker’s bid was too much, too soon, without a proper impact assessment.[...]
For many Europeans, the bi-annual clock change is an irritation in spring when it means a shorter night, and a welcome reprieve come the winter season when it means an extra hour in bed. But for others — especially in Germany, where opposition is high — it is a pointless switch that disrupts sleep, upends farming regimes and makes the streets more dangerous. It also presents an administrative challenge: Staff at Germany’s rail giant Deutsche Bahn will spend the weekend switching 120,000 clocks back at thousands of stations across the country. [...]
A study by the Bundestag’s Office of Technology Assessment in 2016 found a decrease of less than 0.8 percent in annual power consumption from lighting. But there were no significant changes from heating. Increasing use of energy-efficient lightbulbs mean they use less energy anyway, further undermining energy saving claims.
28 October 2019
BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Cool
'Cool' - Laurie Taylor traces the trajectory of the notion of ‘cool’ with Joel Dinerstein, Professor of English and American Studies at Tulane University, and author of a study which suggests it originated in American jazz clubs as a stylish defence against racism and cross fertilised with French existentialism and film noir.
Also, ‘cool shades’: Vanessa Brown, Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University, explores the enduring appeal of sunglasses as the ultimate signifiers of ‘cool’ in mass culture.
The Guardian Today in Focus: Naomi Klein on how politics can solve the climate crisis
Activist and author Naomi Klein tells Anushka Asthana that combating the climate crisis must be at the heart of an urgent restructuring of politics and the economy. Plus: Daniel Trilling on the shocking discovery of 39 bodies inside a lorry in Essex.
Dolly Parton's America: Sad Ass Songs
We begin with a simple question: How did the queen of the boob joke become a feminist icon? Helen Morales, author of “Pilgrimage to Dollywood,” gave us a stern directive – look at the lyrics! So we dive into Dolly’s discography, starting with the early period of what Dolly calls “sad ass songs” to find remarkably prescient words of female pain, slut-shaming, domestic violence, and women being locked away in asylums by cheating husbands. We explore how Dolly took the centuries-old tradition of the Appalachian “murder ballad”—an oral tradition of men singing songs about brutally killing women—and flipped the script, singing from the woman’s point of view. And as her career progresses, the songs expand beyond the pain to tell tales of leaving abuse behind.
Wisecrack Edition: MINDFULNESS: Is It Deep or Dumb?
Lately, it seems like everybody's practicing mindfulness to combat the stresses of everyday life. But is this modern adaptation of Buddhist tradition spiritually enlightening, or just an excuse to be extra self-involved? Let's find out in this Wisecrack Edition on Mindfulness: Is It Deep or Dumb?
BBC: In pictures: Thousands join Pride parade in Taiwan
More than 2,000 same-sex couples have married since then, and many of them took part in Saturday's festival, one of the largest Pride events in the region.
The Guardian: Number of Britons leaving for Europe hits a 10-year high
According to initial findings of a report on the migration of UK citizens, 84,000 people are expected to leave Britain for another EU nation this year, compared with 59,000 in 2008. It found that about 11,500 people moved from the UK to Germany in 2018, compared with more than 8,500 in 2008.
The analysis – carried out by the Oxford in Berlin group and the WZB, the Berlin Social Science Centre – also found that the number of British people signing up for German citizenship had risen significantly. While 622 Britons received German citizenship in 2015, 7,493 were naturalised in 2017, a figure that is expected to rise this year. For the EU as a whole, naturalisations rose from 2,106 in 2015 to 14,678 in 2017. [...]
The analysis used OECD figures and national government statistics. Qualitative research surveys were carried out over four months with British citizens in Germany who left the UK between 2008-2019. Of those interviewed, researchers said 30% had described Brexit as having had a direct impact on their mental health. Half said that they would consider giving up their British nationality if necessary to be able to keep their EU nationality. Securing citizenship allows Britons to retain the advantages of EU membership.
Associated Press: Dutch inventor unveils device to scoop plastic out of rivers
A young Dutch inventor is widening his effort to clean up floating plastic from the Pacific Ocean by moving into rivers, too, using a new floating device to catch garbage before it reaches the seas. [...]
Slat’s organization has in the past drawn criticism for focusing only on the plastic trash already floating in the world’s oceans. Experts say 9 million tons (8 million metric tons) of plastic waste, including plastic bottles, bags, toys and other items, flows annually into the ocean from beaches, rivers and creeks, endangering marine life in the oceans, including whales . [...]
The vessel is designed to be moored in rivers and has a shaped nose to deflect away larger floating debris like tree trunks. The interceptors work by guiding plastic waste into an opening in its bow, a conveyor belt then carries the trash into the guts of the machine where it is dropped into dumpsters. The interceptor sends a text message to local operators that can come and empty it when it’s full.
The Guardian: World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin
The patented “Seleggt” process can determine the sex of a chick just nine days after an egg has been fertilised. Male eggs are processed into animal feed, leaving only female chicks to hatch at the end of a 21-day incubation period. [...]
An estimated 4-6 billion male chicks are slaughtered globally every year because they serve no economic purpose. Some are suffocated, others are fed alive into grinding or shredding machines to be processed into reptile food. [...]
Chick culling has become increasingly controversial. In 2015, a video went viral of an Israeli animal rights activist shutting down a chick shredding machine and challenging a police officer to turn it back on. Consumer kickback has prompted a global race to develop a more humane solution.
euronews: Watch: Scientists have taught rats to drive - and they love it
A team of researchers at the University of Richmond have taught rats to drive mini-cars - and not only are the rodents good at it, they enjoy it too. [...]
The study found that the rats actually felt more relaxed after driving, with heightened levels of dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), the hormone that counteracts stress. [...]
That result was reinforced when the rats were given ‘passengers’, with researchers noting that only the animals actually driving the car saw a decrease in stress.
27 October 2019
WorldAffairs: Hong Kong Rising
What started in June as protests against a controversial extradition law has grown into something much larger and more formidable. On this week’s episode of WorldAffairs, David Rennie, columnist for the Economist, Illaria Maria Sala, a freelance journalist based in Hong Kong, and a Chinese reporter who has asked to remain anonymous join WorldAffairs co-host Ray Suarez to discuss what the protests mean for Hong Kong, China, and the pro-democracy movement.
The Daily Beast: How Warren Went From Wonky Blogger to Democratic Frontrunner
Those who have run for the party’s nomination in the past have largely hailed from one of two perches: insurgents or establishment types. Warren’s candidacy is a synthesis of the two. She has spent decades operating in elite institutions from Harvard to the Obama administration to the halls of Congress. But she is also the first true candidate of the Netroots era of the Democratic Party, in which wonkiness and unapologetic progressivism are both regarded as unimpeachable political virtues. [...]
The Democratic Party has had candidates closely associated with online activism before. Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign was fueled by a nascent Internet culture that was, in retrospect, the first true iteration of the so-called blogosphere. Barack Obama took concepts of community organizing and applied them to emerging social media channels to fuel his rise. And Bernie Sanders built a small dollar online donor network that has far surpassed anything previously constructed in electoral politics. [...]
Warren may not be the preferred candidate for all of these individuals or others whose roots are in the era of blogging. Indeed, many veterans of the early Netroots era have gone on to work for other presidential candidates or media outlets or political entities that simply won’t play in the 2020 primary. But her rise does represent the remarkable degree to which Democratic politics has shifted from a place where insurgents were seen as pesky naifs and political outsiders to one where they run the show.
The Guardian: Trump's America will be saddled with debt – just like his bankrupted hotels
Once upon a time, conservatives said they hated Barack Obama because of his budget deficits. They said he was destroying America and its future, which made them very angry indeed. They were so mad about all those Obama debts that they invented a new party, and named it after the revolutionaries who opposed a nasty British king. The Tea Party was a collection of strange people, including one candidate who promised she wasn’t a witch.
But the strangest thing happened after Obama moved out of the White House, and an orange man moved in. That was when conservatives all across America decided they didn’t actually hate debt and deficits after all. [...]
Even the prayer people were happy to set aside their morals. They know that Trump’s kind of magical thinking is precisely what the world needs right now, otherwise everybody would get very upset at the way the planet is warming, the threat of nuclear war, and the global refugee crisis. Right now we obviously need the kind of leader who is completely ignorant about the consequences, and just lives in the moment.
TLDR News: Europe's Top 10 Richest and Poorest Places - Data Dive (Sep 11, 2018)
The is a lot of difference between rich and poor areas all over the world, and Europe is no exception. We run down the richest and poorest areas in Northern Europe and discuss the issues which arise from income inequality in Europe.
The Guardian: Trump's presidency is built on lies. Does he actually believe them?
From the phantom peace in Syria to the phantom wall on the Mexican border, the Trump presidency is based on the theory that reality is created by mere assertion. The scariest interpretation of the torrent of Trump lies is that the president actually believes the words that he is saying each time his lips move. [...]
By any rational measure, the Watergate break-in was dangerously unnecessary since Nixon would go on to carry 49 states against the hapless McGovern, even without planted microphones at Democratic headquarters. [...]
Taylor’s written statement ended with an earnest plea: “We must support Ukraine in its fight against its bullying neighbor. Russian aggression cannot stand.” Sadly, the same thing can be said about the Kurds, whom Trump also cynically and willfully abandoned.
read the article
By any rational measure, the Watergate break-in was dangerously unnecessary since Nixon would go on to carry 49 states against the hapless McGovern, even without planted microphones at Democratic headquarters. [...]
Taylor’s written statement ended with an earnest plea: “We must support Ukraine in its fight against its bullying neighbor. Russian aggression cannot stand.” Sadly, the same thing can be said about the Kurds, whom Trump also cynically and willfully abandoned.
read the article
The Guardian: Anti-LGBT rhetoric stokes tensions in eastern Europe
In Poland, and elsewhere in central Europe, there has been a notable rise in tolerance and empathy towards the LGBT community in recent years, illustrated by the emergence of a confident new generation of activists in smaller towns and cities. But across the region, populist politicians and church leaders are using the issue to mobilise their conservative bases. [...]
That message will resonate with activists in Poland, where senior members of the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) have engaged in an increasingly ferocious campaign portraying so-called “LGBT ideology” as a menace akin to that of Soviet-imposed communism. In the run-up to parliamentary elections this month, which PiS narrowly won, the “LGBT issue” emerged as one of the main campaign grounds. [...]
In Hungary, where the church is less powerful than in Poland, there is less deep-rooted homophobia. Budapest was one of the first cities in the region to have pride marches. But in recent months the ruling Fidesz party of the far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has begun what appears to be a coordinated homophobic campaign. [...]
n the Czech Republic, attitudes are even more progressive, with a recent survey showing 61% of people supported a bill currently under consideration that would legally enshrine gay marriage. But here too, conservative politicians are rallying part of their base with homophobic rhetoric disguised as a promotion of “traditional values”.
The Guardian: Life in the 'hairy underground': the lost history of Soviet hippies
Lampmann is one of the stars of Soviet Hippies, a film by the Estonian writer and director Terje Toomistu about a lost period in Soviet history. The documentary explores a subculture that was inspired by the west yet distinctly homegrown – existing in a society shaped by communism and watched over by the KGB.
“In the west, nobody was arrested simply for having long hair or wearing strange clothes,” Toomistu explains. The USSR, by contrast, wanted complete control of its citizens’ lives: how people worked, dressed, or even danced. Anyone who rejected the Homo sovieticus model could be in “big trouble”, including having their hair forcibly cut. [...]
By the late 70s, the hippies had developed a counterculture, with Russian slang and a music scene. There was what Toomistu calls “analogue Facebook” – notebooks listing names and numbers of contacts across the USSR, used by travellers seeking somewhere to crash for the night. This network is gloriously animated in the film, which features psychedelic drawings and cartoons.
The Guardian: Offshore windfarms ‘can provide more electricity than the world needs’
Analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) revealed that if windfarms were built across all useable sites which are no further than 60km (37 miles) off the coast, and where coastal waters are no deeper than 60 metres, they could generate 36,000 terawatt hours of renewable electricity a year. This would easily meeting the current global demand for electricity of 23,000 terawatt hours. [...]
The study predicts offshore wind generation will grow 15-fold to emerge as a $1tn (£780bn) industry in the next 20 years and will prove to be the next great energy revolution.
The IEA said earlier this week that global supplies of renewable electricity were growing faster than expected and could expand by 50% in the next five years, driven by a resurgence in solar energy. Offshore wind power would drive the world’s growth in clean power due to plummeting costs and new technological breakthroughs, including turbines close to the height of the Eiffel Tower and floating installations that can harness wind speeds further from the coast.
24 October 2019
WorldAffairs: The Legacy of US Colonialism
While the US has moved away from the term “colony,” the legacy of its colonial rule endures. In this week’s episode, we’re talking about America’s covert history of expansion and how that has impacted the people who live in those places. Daniel Immerwahr, professor of history at Northwestern University and author of the book, How to Hide an Empire, A History of the Greater United States, and Ed Morales, journalist and author of the new book, Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico, join WorldAffairs co-host Ray Suarez to discuss how Puerto Rico and other American territories navigate their complicated national identities.
BBC4 Analysis: A question of artefacts
How should museums deal with contentious legacies?
Two years since the French President, Emmanuel Macron, called for the restitution of objects taken at the height of Europe’s empires, some French and Dutch museums have started the process to hand back some artefacts. However, most of the UK’s main institutions remain reluctant.
Should we empty our museums to make amends for our colonial past? In this edition of Analysis, David Baker speaks to people on all sides of the argument to get to the bottom of a topic that is pitching the art world up against global politics.
The Art Assignment: The Case for Impressionism
Impressionism is one of the best known and loved movements in Art History, but why? We present a case for why Impressionism is interesting and worth your attention and admiration, beyond the famous names behind it of Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissaro, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, et al.
UnHerd: Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?
Both Hitler and Mussolini incentivised childbearing with limited success. In the 1960s Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu, eager to boost his nation’s demographic heft, removed the availability of contraception overnight. At first there was a sharp increase in the number of babies being born, but before too long people found ways around the system, and by the time of his fall, Ceaușescu’s Romania was not performing much better from a population perspective than most of its neighbours – which is to say, very poorly. [...]
Likewise in nearby Poland, where the current government stands on a pro-traditional-family platform and since 2016 has offered relatively generous child benefits – £100 per month per child – as well as maintaining strict anti-abortion laws. The policy has been credited with helping the ruling Law and Justice party win re-election, but, as in Hungary, the rise in fertility is small and still leaves Poland at barely two-thirds of what would be required for replacement. [...]
For now, two things for sure can be said. First, the best guarantee of avoiding the very lowest fertility rates in developed countries is an acceptance of extra-marital births and assistance to women in combining work and family. Where women get the education to aspire but are not encouraged to combine aspiration with motherhood, they tend to opt for the former, which is why fertility rates are so low in countries with traditional attitudes to women in the workplace, such as Italy and Japan, but higher in places like Scandinavia and France.
Second, much as governments can try their best, the only true guarantee of replacement fertility is a family-oriented and child-loving culture. Societies or ethnic groups wanting to survive and thrive should not just look to their governments for tax breaks and benefits but should look to themselves, their values and attitudes.
UnHerd: Are Americans becoming less Christian?
Culture wars are always about religion in a sense, and since the 18th century in France and later in England the Left has been more secular, or even anti-religious. It’s obviously true in the US, where conservatives are more religious and many flashpoint issues are over faith; today just 16 per cent of American liberals think religious faith gives them a “great deal” of meaning in life, compared to 62 per cent of “very conservative” Americans. [...]
Liberal politics is by nature optimistic and it’s also more universalistic (because it it is so heavily influenced by Christianity). Conservatives losing their religion is a darker prospect, since conservatism is more pessimistic and more “basic”, in the sense that it is the mindset for the default human existence, a world of threat and danger. [...]
These religious voters have higher social capital, are more trusting, more likely to volunteer and more satisfied with their neighbourhood and with family relationships, all things that correlate with lower prejudice. Since 1992 the share of Americans with no religion has quadrupled, but it has trebled even among conservatives.
BBC: 'Sex work paid my student bills. Now I regret it'
A survey of students suggested that one in 25 undergraduates have tried adult work, including sugar dating by going out with older men, selling used underwear and having sex for money. [...]
The proportion of those asked - who had done some kind of adult work - was double the proportion of the previous year.
An additional 6% of students said they would try adult work if they needed emergency cash.
Nearly four in five students worried about making ends meet, according to the survey which was published in August. [...]
"Adult work can feel isolating because of the stigma attached to it, meaning that if the student has a negative or dangerous experience they might feel unable to talk about it, leading to a deeper sense of loneliness," she said.
The Guardian: Evicted by Matthew Desmond review – what if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?
You might not think that there is a lot of money to be extracted from a dilapidated trailer park or a black neighbourhood of “sagging duplexes, fading murals, 24-hour daycares”. But you would be wrong. Tobin Charney makes $400,000 a year out of his 131 trailers, some of which are little better than hovels. Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher who is one of the only black female landlords in the city, makes enough in rents on her numerous properties – some presentable, others squalid – to holiday in Jamaica and attend conferences on real estate. [...]
The main condition holding them back, Desmond argues, is rent. The standard measure is that your rent should be no more than 30% of your income, but for poor people it can be 70% or more. After he paid Sherrena his $550 rent out of his welfare cheque, Lamar had only $2.19 a day for the month. When he is forced to repay a welfare cheque he has been sent in error and falls behind on rent, he sells his food stamps for half their face value and volunteers to paint an upstairs apartment, but it is not enough. People such as Lamar live in chronic debt to their landlord, who can therefore oust them easily whenever it is convenient – if they demand repairs, for example, like Doreen, or if a better tenant comes along. Sherrena liked renting to the clients of a for-profit agency that handles – for a fee – the finances of people on disability payments who can’t manage on their own. Money from government programmes intended to help the poor – welfare, disability benefits, the earned-income tax credit – go straight into the landlord’s pocket and, ironically, fuel rising housing costs. Public housing and housing vouchers are scarce. Three in four who qualify for housing assistance get nothing. [...]
As Desmond shows, the main victims of eviction are women. Why? They are paid less than men for doing the same job. They are less able to make deals with their landlord, who is almost always a man, to work off part of their rent with manual labour. The main reason, though, is that women are raising children as single mothers. They not only have all the costs and burdens of childrearing, they need bigger apartments – which, since landlords dislike renting to families with young children, are harder to find and a lot harder to keep. Other sociologists – Kathryn Edin, for example – have found that single mothers often get help under the table from their children’s fathers, but Arleen, Doreen and Doreen’s adult daughter Patrice get mostly trouble from men, who are variously abusive, addicted, vanished or in prison. In one of the book’s many small sad moments, Arleen claims she receives child support in order to seem more stable and respectable to a prospective landlord. In fact, she gets nothing.
23 October 2019
The Atlantic: The Window for Brexit May Already Have Closed
Over that same period, however, Britain’s Conservative Party has become more and more committed to Brexit. Sixty-three percent of Conservative Party supporters would rather see Scotland secede from the United Kingdom than abandon the Brexit project. Sixty-one percent of Conservatives would accept significant damage to the British economy to achieve Brexit. Fifty-nine percent would let Northern Ireland go. Fifty-four percent would rather see the Conservative Party itself destroyed than yield on Brexit. [...]
This time, however, the historic British resolution for political crises is unavailable. New rules lock the Johnson government into office until 2022 unless two-thirds of Parliament approve an earlier election. Even if there were an election, Johnson might not lose, because the main opposition party—Labour—has chosen as its leader an extreme leftist who is widely regarded as pathetically inadequate. Jeremy Corbyn’s own parliamentary party has repeatedly tried to get rid of him, accusing him of anti-Semitism, misogyny, and general cluelessness. By a margin of 13 percentage points, British people would prefer even the most painful possible Brexit to a Corbyn-led government.[...]
Johnson could try to lead Britain out of the EU despite the extension. Some of his ministers say they are determined to drive forward regardless of public opinion. But Parliament has voted to require affirmative approval by Parliament of a British exit. Johnson would have to defy that vote and arguably break the law to achieve Brexit. The British courts have slapped him down once, when he tried to prorogue Parliament despite lacking a working majority in the House of Commons. If he bolts for Brexit despite the law, the courts will surely slap him down again. While Johnson is a risk-taking politician, he is no Donald Trump: He is not ultimately a lawbreaker. [...]
What is driving the change in the U.K. is generational replacement. Until very recently, Britain was marked by a uniquely weak attachment to a “European” identity. On the eve of the Brexit vote, only 15 percent of British people thought of themselves as “European,” by far the lowest level of identification for a big EU state. The most striking and surprising effect of the Brexit debate in the U.K. has been to incubate for the first time a European political identity among the young. You see EU-flag pins on backpacks on the subway, EU flags in windows around the University of London. Since June 2016, 2.5 million young people have entered the British electorate, and about 1.4 million older people have died out of it.
The Week: The coming end of Christian America
America is still a "Christian nation," if the term simply means a majority of the population will claim the label when a pollster calls. But, as a new Pew Research report unsparingly explains, the decline of Christianity in the United States "continues at a rapid pace." A bare 65 percent of Americans now say they're Christians, down from 78 percent as recently as 2007. The deconverted are mostly moving away from religion altogether, and the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated — the "nones" — have swelled from 16 to 26 percent over the same period. If this rate of change continues, the U.S. will be majority non-Christian by about 2035, with the nones representing well over one third of the population. [...]
In what remains of the American church, reactions to this decline will vary. Some will see it as a positive apocalypse, which is to say a revealing of what was always true. America was never really a Christian nation. Our government and society have long made choices and embraced values that are difficult, if not impossible, to square with Christianity, so an end of any association between the two is welcome. Likewise, the proportion of Americans who actually practiced Christian faith in any meaningful, life-altering sense was always substantially lower than the proportion who would identify as Christian in a poll. What we're seeing is less mass deconversion than a belated honesty which may be an opportunity for new faithfulness, repentance, or even revival. [...]
Yet as contradictory as it may seem, I'll also suggest left-wing nones may come to find they miss the religious right when grappling with its successor. The New York Times' Ross Douthat has argued the post-religious right of which President Trump has given us a glimpse will be an ugly beast indeed. Polling shows the "churchgoers who ultimately voted for Trump over Clinton still tend to hold different views than his more secular supporters," he wrote last year, including being "less authoritarian and tribal on race and identity. ...The trend was consistent: The more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration." In other words, on the right, the decline of Christianity looks to mean the rise of racism, as the communal life of active faith is replaced by darker impulses.
UnHerd: Will the Evangelicals dump Trump?
This was Donald Trump’s third appearance at the convention in the last four years, a necessity when 81% of white Evangelicals voted for him in 2016. After sticking with Trump through sexual assault accusations and scores of half-truths and outright lies, it seemed as though nothing could shake their faith in the man; yet an accumulation of factors may be eroding Evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the President, and perhaps even undermining their support altogether. [...]
Even religiously conservative politicians are starting to break ranks. Retiring Illinois Rep. John Shimkus, who gained notoriety for using the Bible to dismiss climate change, officially withdrew his support for the President over the “despicable” decision regarding Syria. And prominent conservative Christian media personality Erick Erickson tweeted at Nancy Pelosi to speed up the impeachment process so that “perhaps we’ll still have time to save some of the Kurds”. [...]
This betrayal is especially hard to swallow because Christian persecution in the Middle East has been a prominent issue for American conservative Christians, and many have therefore been keeping track of how the Kurds became the major defenders of Christian minority populations in Iraq and Syria. American Evangelicals fear these Middle Eastern Christians may now be endangered by a policy that decimates and alienates the Kurds and allows for the resurgence of ISIS. [...]
Yet even with Trump’s apparent success in reshaping the courts, Evangelicals may be in for a disappointment. New Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have pushed the Court somewhat to the Right, but they haven’t been the firebrand conservatives that many conservatives were looking for. The new justices may prove unwilling to halt the trend of advances made to LGBT rights, and sexual identity may be ruled a federally protected class.
The Economist: How Brexit is changing the EU
Brexit once seemed to pose an existential threat to the European Union. But Britain's withdrawal process has had some surprising results—especially when it comes to how other member states view the EU.
UnHerd: Is Prince Harry the new Edward VIII?
Harry has broken the convention that royalty does not say how it feels. He has shattered the bargain that, in return for obsessive attention – I will not call it privilege, because it isn’t – you submit to be feasted on, in every aspect of your life. The only possible way to survive is to say nothing, do nothing, be nothing – to be the vessel – but Harry cannot do this. Catherine Middleton, born into the middle class, can; it is as if, as an outsider who watched monarchy, she knew the market. [...]
I found this touching, because it was never going to be fair. Are you fair to that which you consume? The media does not hate Meghan, nor does it love her – it is simply indifferent. They are material to be consumed, which is why a tabloid will have pieces both for and against them within pages of each other. This piece, of course, is part of the consumption.
I would liberate Britain from this dirty bargain, which infantilises the public, succours the class system, fills newspapers with junk and ruins the object of its obsession. I think Harry is right to sue, but it will not serve him. You cannot make monarchy rational, or safe for its victims; you cannot amend it, or make it kind.
The Guardian: Election results give hope to opposition in Poland and Hungary
Cas Mudde, a political scientist and leading populism expert at the University of Georgia, said: “In both Hungary and Poland the opposition seemed to understand the fundamental challenge to liberal democracy they were facing. Strategic collaboration is crucial, particularly when the government party is gaming the system by, for example, controlling the media.” [...]
In Hungary, meanwhile, the hardline prime minister, Viktor Orbán, suffered his greatest political setback in a decade when a pro-European, centre-left challenger ousted the Fidesz-backed incumbent as mayor of Budapest by 51% to 44%. [...]
The tactic of fielding joint candidates could potentially offer a route to mounting a serious challenge to the strongman prime minister at the next general elections in 2022, although it could prove more difficult to replicate on a national level. [...]
But the performance of Poland’s Left alliance in returning to parliament also suggested that “with good organisation and positive messaging, opposition parties can do well” even in environments where they are under pressure, he added.
The Guardian: 'A threat to democracy': William Barr's speech on religious freedom alarms liberal Catholics
Prominent liberal Catholics have warned the US attorney general’s devout Catholic faith poses a threat to the separation of church and state, after William Barr delivered a fiery speech on religious freedom in which he warned that “militant secularists” were behind a “campaign to destroy the traditional moral order”. [...]
C Colt Anderson, a Roman Catholic theologian and professor of religion at Jesuit-run Fordham University, said in an interview that he was unaware until this week that Barr was a fellow Catholic. Now, after reading the speech, Anderson believes the attorney general, in revealing his devotion to an especially conservative branch of Catholicism, is a “threat to American democracy”. [...]
Barr did not address the fact that many of the policies of the Trump administration are strongly opposed by the Vatican. Pope Francis has repeatedly pleaded for the United States to open its doors to more refugees, even as Barr has defended policies that turn away or imprison immigrants seeking refugee status at the US-Mexico border, even separating parents from their children. [...]
Barr’s speech at Notre Dame was a reminder of a fact often overlooked in analysis of Trump’s political base – that while the president enjoys the support of many high-profile right-wing Christian evangelical leaders, he has also surrounded himself with conservative Roman Catholics associated with organizations that some others in the faith consider extreme.
euronews: Swiss election: Greens gain while far-right loses ground
As climate change and the country's relationship with the European Union were the main focuses of the political campaign, the Greens rode on voters' climate concerns in the parliamentary election. [...]
According to final results, the Greens (left) are now the fourth party in the National Council (lower house) ahead of the Christian Democratic Party, and trailing the right-wing Liberal-Radical Party by just one seat. [...]
Cabinet seats have been divvied up among the SVP, SP, FDP and CVP in nearly the same way since 1959. The three biggest parties get two seats and the fourth-biggest gets one under the informal "magic formula" system. [...]
Analysts caution against expecting too radical a shift after a campaign that was light on typical hot-button issues such as migration and Swiss ties with the European Union that have given the anti-EU SVP a boost in the past.
The Guardian: King's sacking of consort highlights power of Thai monarchy
While Sineenat was the first officially named consort to a Thai king since the 1920s, she was not the first woman in Vajiralongkorn’s life to lose her position. In 2014 he stripped Srirasmi Akrapongpreecha, his third wife, of most of her titles and had members of her family arrested. His second wife, Sujarinee Vivacharawongse, fled to the US after Vajiralongkorn denounced her in 1996 and disowned their four sons. [...]
Sineenat’s appointment on 28 July this year made Vajiralongkorn the first Thai monarch since King Rama VI, who ruled from 1910 to 1925, to publicly acknowledge multiple female companions. Her consort ceremony was followed by the palace releasing images of her piloting a military plane and shooting a gun. Such images previously had been reserved for the king’s close relatives, and they resembled the military-style photos of Queen Suthida released for her birthday. [...]
Vajiralongkorn’s power shows no sign of abating and he has proved to be an assertive constitutional monarch. His face peers from shrines and billboard advertisements in Bangkok, the latter placed by companies declaring loyalty. A schmaltzy video montage of the king growing up, featuring images of members of the public crawling at his feet, plays in cinemas before film screenings. Audience members are compelled to stand for it.
16 October 2019
CNN: Here's a BIG clue on the real reason Donald Trump doesn't want to release his taxes
None of those reasons made -- or make -- any sense. But now, thanks to CNN reporting, we may know the real reason why the President is fighting so hard to keep his returns from ever seeing the light of day: Because he paid so little in taxes -- especially for someone who makes as much money as Trump does. [...]
CLINTON: "So you gotta ask yourself -- why won't he release his tax returns? And I think there may be a couple of reasons. First, maybe he is not as rich as he says he has. Second, maybe he's not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don't know all of his business dealings but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about six hundred and fifty million dollars to Wall Street and foreign banks. Or maybe he does not want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he has paid nothing in federal taxes because the only years that anybody has ever seen for a couple of years where he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license. And they showed he did not pay any federal income tax. [...]
So, if Trump did indeed pay no taxes for almost 20 years, you could see why that's the sort of thing he wouldn't want to be made public before he runs for a second term. Because what might have been smart for Donald Trump, the private citizen, looks a lot worse for Donald Trump, the president. Especially since Trump has routinely railed against companies taking advantage of the tax code to avoiding paying any taxes at all.
read the article
CLINTON: "So you gotta ask yourself -- why won't he release his tax returns? And I think there may be a couple of reasons. First, maybe he is not as rich as he says he has. Second, maybe he's not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don't know all of his business dealings but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about six hundred and fifty million dollars to Wall Street and foreign banks. Or maybe he does not want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he has paid nothing in federal taxes because the only years that anybody has ever seen for a couple of years where he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license. And they showed he did not pay any federal income tax. [...]
So, if Trump did indeed pay no taxes for almost 20 years, you could see why that's the sort of thing he wouldn't want to be made public before he runs for a second term. Because what might have been smart for Donald Trump, the private citizen, looks a lot worse for Donald Trump, the president. Especially since Trump has routinely railed against companies taking advantage of the tax code to avoiding paying any taxes at all.
read the article
The Guardian: Why China fears sending the tanks into Hong Kong
The problem of open-ended civil unrest in Hong Kong, which has been punctuated by rising acts of violence and vandalism carried out by a distinct but hardline minority, is a reflection of China’s new assertiveness under Xi – an assertiveness that marks a break with the caution of the post-Mao era. It can be seen in Xi’s signature undertaking, the Belt and Road Initiative – an infrastructure building project with global ambitions. Or, most recently, the flaunting of new weapons systems during the military parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of Communist party rule – a declaration of China’s intention to rival American military power more openly than at any time in the recent past.[...]
This blocking of any path forward that would permit more self-determination under Chinese sovereignty – as promised when Britain handed Hong Kong back to the mainland in 1997 – has led to a marked radicalisation of Hong Kong’s population this year, and created a revolt of the middle class. The peaceful demonstrations that have regularly drawn hundreds of thousands of residents into the streets since the summer have included many older people, as well as plenty of residents from other segments of the population long assumed to be conservative or at least acquiescent, whether civil servants or business people. [...]
From here, Beijing’s choices in Hong Kong will not grow easier. The ultimate option, of course, is to mount a police or military intervention from the mainland in order to put down the protests. But at what cost? Hong Kong would lose forever its status as a global, cosmopolitan city, a goose that lays golden eggs for China. Since Deng Xiaoping introduced capitalism to China, Hong Kong has served as a critical business and investment portal for the country: a place where foreign companies feel it is safer for them to be based because of the independent judicial system and a banking structure that allows the free conversion of currencies and unlimited international transfers. As China has grown vastly richer it has become less dependent on Hong Kong for such purposes, but lots of investment into China still passes through the city.
15 October 2019
The Guardian: The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream
The spread of the belief that elites conspired to push Muslim immigration on their native populations is also the story of a conspiracy theory that was nourished on some of the very first blogs and message boards, started appearing in mainstream discourse after 9/11, and then took on a life of its own, even while the supposed facts behind it were exposed as ridiculous. It is a lesson in the danger of half-truths, which are not only more powerful than truths but often more powerful than lies.
Eurabia is a term coined in the 70s that was resurfaced by Gisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband. She wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”). In a series of books, originally written in French and published from the 1990s onward, she developed a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims in exchange for oil.
The original villain of Littman’s story was General Charles de Gaulle. It is difficult for an outsider to understand how De Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazis and was probably the greatest conservative statesman in French history, could be reinvented as the man who betrayed western civilisation for money. But Littman had lived many years in France, and the French far right hated De Gaulle, and indeed tried several times to assassinate him. Not only had De Gaulle fought the Vichy government, he had also admitted defeat in the long and hideously bloody war of Algerian independence – granting an Arab Muslim country its freedom at the expense of the French-Christian settler population, who had to retreat to France (and whose descendants formed the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front). [...]
The idea of the great replacement had its origin in a blatantly racist French novel of the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints, in which France is overthrown by an unarmed invasion of starving, sex-crazed Indian refugees when the French army is not prepared to fire on them. The moral of the book is that western civilisation can only be saved by a willingness to slaughter poor brown people. Steve Bannon, among the founders of the rightwing news site Breitbart and a former adviser to President Trump, has referred to it repeatedly. [...]
One of the many bad fruits of 9/11 was the new atheist movement, a phenomenon marked by mutual self-praise and undeviating hostility to Islam. Even if the ostensible target of much of the hostility was Christianity, the new atheists tend to consider Islam far worse and more “religious” a religion. The American writer Sam Harris’s breakthrough book The End of Faith from 2004 now reads like Bat Ye’or without the inconvenient scaffolding of easily disproved facts. “We are at war with Islam,” he writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists … Armed conflict ‘in the defence of Islam’ is a religious obligation for every Muslim man ... Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”
BBC4 In Our Time: Rousseau on Education
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Rousseau's ideas on how to educate children so they retain their natural selves and are not corrupted by society.
The Atlantic: Is Boris Johnson Actually Winning?
Politically, winning is short-term and transactional: It involves setting the question you want voters to answer—and getting them to respond in the way you want, all in the service of winning elections. If successful, you gain the power necessary to achieve the things you want to do and to stop the things you do not. This is the game as played by political strategists across the world, including those most central to Johnson’s electoral successes to date: Lynton Crosby and Dominic Cummings. With Brexit, it is no different. It’s just that the stakes on the table are much higher. [...]
Of course, there have been huge compromises. Johnson has conceded that Northern Ireland alone will align with EU standards, and appears to have conceded that actual border checks cannot take place along or near to the border with the Republic of Ireland. While no agreement has yet emerged—and may not—Johnson’s stance has produced enough movement from Dublin and Brussels to create a pathway to a deal. The solution reportedly under consideration (a complicated tariff arrangement that would see Northern Ireland remain legally part of the U.K.’s customs zone, while for practical purposes being treated as if it were part of the EU’s) is a rehashing of a May proposal for the whole of the U.K. that was rejected by the EU. That Brussels has not rejected Johnson’s plan is an achievement in and of itself.
Johnson’s political strategy at home is also showing early signs of success. In contrast to May, he has sought to control the agenda, setting a simple narrative in the public’s mind about what he is trying to achieve and why voters should not blame him if he fails. Like Donald Trump with the border wall with Mexico, he calculates that it is not failure that is punished by voters, but a lack of trying.
FiveThirtyEight: There Are Plenty Of Anti-Trump Republicans — You Just Have To Know Where To Look
But looking at Trump’s standing only among people currently inside of powerful Republican-controlled spaces — the party itself, Fox News, the White House, etc. — presents an incomplete picture and understates opposition to Trump among Republican politicians and activists. Almost by definition, that opposition can’t happen within the obvious GOP spaces — the president and his acolytes have accumulated enough power that it’s increasingly hard to be both be anti-Trump and a Republican in good standing at a major conservative institution. [...]
There were 241 Republicans in the U.S. House in early 2017, at the start of Trump’s tenure. Since then, more than a quarter have either been defeated at the ballot box, in last November’s elections (29), or retired (36).3 Some of them, such as former Rep. Mia Love of Utah, blame Trump’s unpopularity for their defeats. Others, such as Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, hint that they are leaving Congress in part because they are uncomfortable with the direction Trump is taking the GOP, as the Washington Post recently reported in a story detailing the exodus of House Republicans. [...]
In a clear and public rebuke to Trump, chiefs of staff for Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush recently told the New York Times that the presidents they served would never have asked for help winning an election from a foreign government. A group of conservative lawyers, many of whom served in top positions in the Department of Justice under Reagan or one of the Bushes, are supporting the impeachment inquiry. [...]
All of this helps explain why Republican voters are among the most loyal-to-Trump constituencies in the Republican Party. Surveys have long suggested that between 85 and 90 percent of Republican voters approve of the president. Only about 13 percent of people who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 said that they disapproved of Trump in a poll conducted in late 2018 and early 2019 by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of impeachment polls, about 14 percent of Republicans support impeachment.
Politico: New poll has Warren leading Biden ahead of next Democratic debate
Warren leads Biden by 30 percent to 27 percent among Democratic voters and independents who lean Democratic, according to a Quinnipiac University poll published Monday.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is expected to return to the campaign trail after recovering from a recent heart attack, came in at third with 11 percent. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg received 8 percent, while Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) received 4 percent. No other candidate topped 2 percent in support.
Biden, according to the poll, remains the most electable candidate in voters' minds, with 48 percent saying he's the one to beat Trump in the 2020 general election, but Warren is gaining ground. The Massachusetts senator sits at 21 percent, an increase from 9 percent in August. [...]
Support for impeaching Trump has seen a slight uptick in the last week. In an October 8 Quinnipiac poll, 45 percent of voters said Trump should be impeached, while 49 percent said he shouldn’t.
14 October 2019
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: What if We Nuke a City?
As you may have noticed, we like to blow stuff up on this channel. So when the International Red Cross approached us to collaborate on a video about nuclear weapons, we were more than excited. Until we did the research. It turned out we were a bit oblivious off the real impact of nuclear weapons in the real world, on a real city. And especially, how helpless even the most developed nations on earth would be if an attack occurred today.
So hopefully this video demonstrates how extremely non fun a real world nuclear attack would be, without being to gruesome. This collaboration was a blast (no pun intended) and we want to say a huge thank you to the International Red Cross!
The Atlantic: Why Doesn’t Steve Bannon Matter in Europe?
Yet after all that time, Bannon has little to show for his efforts. Though many far-right parties have made significant gains, further establishing themselves as permanent fixtures on the European political stage, the far-right surge that was expected didn’t come to pass. (This was reaffirmed in subsequent elections across the Continent, where although some parties underperformed, they at least demonstrated their relatively high electoral floor.) [...]
But perhaps the greatest inhibitor of Bannon’s success in Europe has been the very far-right parties he has professed to support. Though the former Donald Trump strategist has appeared alongside some of Europe’s most high-profile far-right leaders—from Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally in France, to Matteo Salvini, the head of the League and Italy’s erstwhile interior minister—few have agreed to unite under his nationalist banner. The Sweden Democrats expressed “no interest” in Bannon’s project. Vlaams Belang, a Flemish nationalist party, called the effort “poorly organized.” The Alternative for Germany said the interests of Europe’s anti-establishment parties are too “divergent” to be united. [...]
But it’s not just Bannon’s Americanness that makes some European nationalist parties resistant to working with him. Their reluctance also stems from what is perceived as a fundamental misunderstanding of the way these parties work. Though many of Europe’s far-right movements are united in their shared views on immigration, the economy, and the role and future of the European Union, these beliefs don’t always manifest themselves in the same political goals. Despite hopes that they would be a dominant force in the European Parliament after elections this May, right-wing populist parties instead had to settle for forming the fifth-largest grouping in the legislature—their national priorities took precedence over any broader project. (The current far-right grouping, led by Salvini, failed, for example, to persuade Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz to join it.) [...]
“The mere fact that you are writing an article about him, I think, is part of his personal strategy,” Eric Maurice, the director of the Brussels-based Robert Schuman Foundation, a European think tank, told me, “of trying to look like someone who is everywhere, pulling the strings, working on a master plan to put the far right … in power.”
The Guardian: Trump's mounting troubles in Iowa could spell doom for Republicans
Trump’s trade war with China caused John Deere, the largest employer in Iowa, to cut production by 20% and lay off 160 workers in the Quad Cities along the Mississippi River. Crop markets are in disarray as China was the largest consumer of soybeans until that market was shut down.
Farmers have been furious with Trump for waiving ethanol blending requirements, which the EPA has tried to smooth over with vague promises for the corn-based fuel. But the trust has been breached, and mothballed ethanol plants in north-west Iowa are unlikely to fire up again. [...]
If she votes for evicting Trump she could be seen as a maverick, like Grassley was as a younger man. Independent voters – the biggest Iowa bloc – like honest mavericks. If she votes with Trump, Ernst risks losing re-election to one of four Democrats seeking the nomination in a primary next June.
euronews: Hungary local elections: Opposition candidate Karácsony unseats Fidesz-backed incumbent in Budapest
Hungary's opposition scored its biggest election victory in a decade on Sunday when opposition challenger Gergely Karacsony defeated ruling party-backed incumbent Istvan Tarlos in the Budapest mayoral election. [...]
Opposition parties were also projected to win a majority in the Budapest General Assembly with 17 members, compared with 14 delegates from Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling Fidesz-Christian Democrat alliance and two independents. [...]
Budapest is home to about a fifth of Hungary’s population of 10 million, but it is responsible for more than a third of its economic output and plays an outsized role in all walks of national life.
13 October 2019
UnHerd: Who is Abiy Ahmed?
Abiy Ahmed, who emerged from a contentious internal party battle to become Prime Minister last year, seemed to some to be tailor-made to handle this particular crisis. His heritage reflected both groups: Abiy’s mother was an Amhara and a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (for centuries the predominant social institution within the country, with its roots primarily in the North), while his father was an Oromo Muslim (the Oromo community is a mix of Christians and Muslims, adding to their marginaliation in a country long defined by its Christian identity). Abiy spoke both groups’ languages, as well as Tigrinya and English. He was highly educated and trained in the arts of peacemaking, with a Masters and Ph.D. in leadership and conflict resolution respectively.[...]
But Abiy quickly proved that he was unlike past Ethiopian rulers. He has replaced hardliners within the governments and purged the military of many of its old officers. He reversed many of the oppressive policies that had both sparked the protests and become intensified during the turmoil. Instead of continuing violent repressions of demonstrators, Abiy released thousands of political prisoners and eased press and internet censorship. [...]
During his first year, Abiy also went about settling a longstanding conflict with neighbouring Eritrea. The country was once part of Ethiopia, but after the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front played a major role in overthrowing the communist Derg, the Eritreans were rewarded with independence. A peaceful split in 1993 turned sour five years later, as a border dispute over a small town named Badme blew up into a three-year conflict that lefts tens of thousands dead on both sides. The war ended in a hostile standoff, similar to that between India and Pakistan in Kashmir or the Koreas along the Demilitarized Zone, until Abiy decided to cede the disputed Badme to Eritrea and personally oversaw the restorations of friendly relations between the two countries. [...]
Beyond the specific anti-Tigray sentiments fomenting in Ethiopia, Abiy’s reforms have stirred up ethnic nationalism throughout the country. Ethiopia has been able to manage its ethnically diverse society more smoothly than many African nations, in part because the country avoided European colonisation in the 19th century. Ethiopia’s border and ethnic mix were therefore determined locally, through a long period of internal state-building and adjustment.
The Guardian: Abandoning Kurds could cost Trump support of evangelical Christians
Evangelical Christian voters have been among Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic and reliable supporters. Trump’s recent rejection of asylum seekers and cuts to domestic food assistance programs have not stopped followers of Christ from flocking to the president. [...]
“It is very possible that the American withdrawal from the region will lead to the extinction of Christianity from the region,” Ashty Bahro, former director of the Evangelical Alliance of Kurdistan, told the Christianity Today news outlet. [...]
White evangelicals made up 26% of voters in the last presidential election and they voted 81% for Trump, according to Robert P Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and author of The End of White Christian America. [...]
But evangelical Christians are not ready to cast Trump out entirely. Earlier this week CBN News, America’s top Christian-themed media outlet, reported that Trump would be the keynote speaker this weekend at the Value Voters Summit, a huge political convention for evangelical Christians.
The Guardian: Toronto Syrian restaurant owners defy death threats to stay open
Soon after the Al-Soufi family emigrated to Canada in 2015, they launched a restaurant, Soufi’s, in downtown Toronto, which won international acclaim not only for its menu, but also its commitment to help newly arrived Syrian refugees adapt to life in Canada. In a glowing profile, the New York Times held up the restaurant as an emblem of “Canada’s embrace of the Syrian refugees”. [...]
Alaa had travelled to the city of Hamilton to join a demonstration outside a rally for a far-right populist candidate, Maxime Bernier, whose fringe People’s Party of Canada has been described as xenophobic and racist. [...]
At a press conference outside the restaurant, Husam Al-Soufi told reporters that the decision to close “came from a place of fear” – but the outpouring of support had inspired the family to continue serving the city.
12 October 2019
BBC4 Analysis: Whiteness
Whiteness, white privilege and white supremacy are now part of the conversation on race – what does it mean for white people.
BBC4 Analysis: The Problem with Boys
By almost any measure of school related performance girls do better than boys. Fewer boys are going to university. Why is this happening and what can be done about it?
The Atlantic: The Conspiracy of Silence Is Cracking
As the week closes, however, something strange has happened. The White House hasn’t changed its stance, but witnesses employed by the executive branch are coming to testify to House committees anyway. On Friday, Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine who was recalled earlier this year, is giving a transcribed interview behind closed doors over State Department objections. Also on Friday, Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, signaled he would testify as well.
Suddenly the obstruction letter is looking a bit more like a Maginot letter: imposing in theory, impotent in practice. One of the leading narratives of the last three years has been that the guardrails thought to constrain the White House are not enforceable on a president with no shame. Yovanovitch and Sondland are illustrating a corollary: Trump’s insistence that his subordinates answer only to him is also unenforceable. A conspiracy of silence works only if people want to conspire. [...]
Motives aside, testimony from Sondland and Yovanovitch, like that of Volker, could influence future witnesses. The House has invited a slew of other current executive-branch employees to testify as well, including William Taylor, now the current top diplomat in Ukraine. In the messages Volker produced, Taylor seemed to be consciously creating a paper record of conversations. “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” he said in one message. Later, Taylor wrote, “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.” Whether these officials testify will help determine whether a dam is breaking or some water has merely spilled over the top.
11 October 2019
FiveThirtyEight: Two Weeks In, Impeachment Is Becoming More Popular
In response to this, we launched an impeachment polling tracker to track how much support impeaching the president had among the public — and whether new revelations in this unfolding saga would change their minds. And based on polls released on or before Sept. 19 (before the Ukraine story broke open), support for impeachment initially sat at 40.1 percent, and opposition was at 51.0 percent. But that began to change after we learned more about the scandal. And now, as of Wednesday, Oct. 9, the polling consensus is clear: Impeachment has gone from fairly unpopular to a near-majority opinion.
According to our average, 48.8 percent of people support impeachment, while only 43.6 percent don’t support it.1 That’s an increase even from last week, when the share of people who supported and opposed impeachment were roughly the same. What’s changed? Early this week, we got a couple new, high-quality polls that showed a majority of Americans in favor of an impeachment inquiry. Most notably, a Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 58 percent of Americans agreed with the House’s decision to start an impeachment inquiry, and only 38 percent disagreed with it. And an Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll found that 55 percent approved of the House’s decision and 44 percent disapproved. [...]
From Sept. 19 to Oct. 9, backing for impeachment among Democrats has increased by 11.2 points (from 71.6 percent support to 82.8 percent support). But backing has also increased among independents by 9.6 points (from 33.9 percent to 43.5 percent). Even some Republicans have had a change of heart: Their support for impeachment has increased by 4.1 points, from 9.7 percent to 13.8 percent.
The Guardian: Brexit’s legacy for England will be politics as sectarian as Northern Ireland’s
To understand that this possible Ulsterisation of British politics is a genuinely serious prospect, step back a bit and consider the way that electoral behaviour has been evolving in Britain. Ever since 1964, political scientists, mainly based at Nuffield College, Oxford, have worked on the British Election Study (BES). For more than half a century they have tracked the decline of the old industrial-based two-party system in which general elections were fought between the Conservatives and Labour, who battled for the floating voters in the middle ground across the land.
Today’s electoral politics are fundamentally different. A long-term trend of dealignment from the two big parties means that voters are no longer loyal battalions of partisans. Millions of individual voters are now happy to switch between an increasing array of parties. In 2015, 43% of them voted for a different party from the one they had supported in 2010. In 2017, 33% switched from their 2015 vote. In 2019, a similar kaleidoscopic change seems certain. Tellingly, a BES study of these two recent elections, due for publication in December, will be titled Electoral Shocks: the Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World. [...]
Northern Ireland’s divides are rooted in centuries of religious divide. The Brexit divide in Britain is far more recent. But it is rooted in identities and anger, too. If Brexit does become the defining issue in mid-21st-century British politics, the hope of a country coming back together could be as fragile as the dream of Irish peace now is, and just as fraught.
Politico: Trump’s Bizarro World Reading of the Constitution
That matters. While the Trump administration has repeatedly taken unprecedented legal positions to delay and stonewall Congress, it previously recognized, however tacitly, the legitimacy of impeachment as a constitutional remedy. Even when it prevented witnesses like former White House counsel Don McGahn from testifying, it provided a fig leaf of justification—executive privilege or attorney-client privilege, for example—thereby implicitly acknowledging the oversight prerogatives of Congress and its power to issue subpoenas. That changed on Tuesday. [...]
While the letter is signed by a lawyer and occasionally uses legal terms, such as “due process,” it is a political document, not a legal one. The complaints that the administration has with the impeachment inquiry are not legal reasons that would excuse a failure to comply with the inquiry. Trump is not going to court. He is not claiming privilege. He has simply declared that the usual rules don’t apply to him. [...]
Both parties have publicly opposed this unconstitutional expansion of presidential power in the past. Not so long ago, when Republicans were arguing for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, they cited President Richard Nixon’s defiance of congressional oversight as a significant justification for his impeachment. Lindsey Graham, then a congressman from South Carolina, made a cogent case for why that article of impeachment was necessary against Nixon and why it was warranted for Clinton. But unless 20 Senate Republicans vote to remove Trump, he will remain in office and his noncompliance with Congress will be unpunished.
10 October 2019
Nature: How science has shifted our sense of identity
It was in the seventh issue — 16 December 1869 — that Huxley advanced a scheme for what he called ‘practical Darwinism’ and we call eugenics. Convinced that continued dominance of the British Empire would depend on the “energetic enterprising” English character, he mused about selecting for a can-do attitude among Britons1. Acknowledging that the law, not to mention ethics, might get in the way, he nevertheless wrote: “it may be possible, indirectly, to influence the character and prosperity of our descendants.” Francis Galton — Darwin’s cousin and an outer planet of Huxley’s solar system — was already writing about similar ideas and would come to be known as the father of eugenics. When this magazine appeared, then, the idea of ‘improving’ human heredity was on many people’s minds — not least as a potent tool of empire. [...]
IQ became a measure not of what you do, but of who you are — a score for one’s inherent worth as a person. In the Progressive era, eugenicists became obsessed with low intelligence, believing it to be the root of crime, poverty, promiscuity and disease. By the time Adolf Hitler expanded eugenics to cover entire ethnic and cultural groups, tens of thousands of people worldwide had already been yanked from the gene pool, sterilized, institutionalized, or both. [...]
Even in strictly scientific terms, ‘you’ are more than the contents of your chromosomes. The human body contains at least as many non-human cells (mostly bacteria, archaea and fungi) as human ones6. Tens of thousands of microbial species crowd and jostle over and through the body, with profound effects on digestion, complexion, disease resistance, vision and mood. Without them, you don’t feel like you; in fact, you aren’t really you. The biological self has been reframed as a cluster of communities, all in communication with each other.
The Conversation: Fake news: emotions and experiences, not more data, could be the antidote
According to the Washington Post, Donald Trump has made more than 12,000 false or misleading statements since becoming US president. Despite this, he remains immensely popular with his own political base, which is energised by his emotional and often aggressive displays. No amount of raw data appears capable of changing their minds. [...]
Since facts and expert knowledge are frequently dismissed as “fake news” or drowned out in a deluge of “alternative facts”, simply offering more data and facts may not work against politicians and people who show resistance to facts that conflict with their prejudices or feelings. [...]
So, can qualitative social research – where the focus is not on abstract facts but on what things mean for people in their everyday lives – come to the rescue? As we argue in our new book, Embodied Research Methods, social scientists do not and cannot rely just on data. When genuinely committed to understanding everyday life, they must also craft rich, nuanced and vivid accounts that flesh out how people live and struggle with the problems they encounter. [...]
This does not mean that we should dress up findings and arguments in strongly emotional claims, but rather conduct and share research in ways that help people connect to, care about and understand the people and issues in the research. As feelings help us care about what is going on, they are an important antidote which can make us question unfounded claims, hasty conclusions and fake news.
Failed Architecture: The Far Right’s Obsession With Modern Architecture
Today, this traditionalist tendency is gaining renewed momentum in various corners of the European Right. In the Netherlands, far-right nationalist politician Thierry Baudet frequently derides the “ugly architecture” that is, in his mind, corrupting Dutch society. And in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has spawned a movement of revivalist architecture by individual practitioners obsessed with Saxon mythology and pitted ideologically against the metropolitan built environment. Amid the rising tide of populism in Europe, Western chauvinists and white supremacists are attempting to re-valorise traditional Western architecture in order to advance their reactionary and exclusive politics. [...]
The motley crew of right-wing architecture critics owes much to the work of Roger Scruton. Scruton positions himself as part of an older conservative philosophical tradition and a stalwart supporter of all things traditional. His gentlemanly demeanour is frequently played up by the British media, including the BBC, who allowed him to host the documentary Why Beauty Matters in 2009. In the documentary, Scruton repeatedly refers to the “crime of modern architecture”, and in one scene argues sardonically that the architects of a dilapidated office block were as much vandals as those who later graffiti-tagged the place. The argument of the documentary more polemically restates the general thesis of his 1979 book The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in the Age of Nihilism — where “nihilism” may as well be an indeterminate synonym for “left-wing”. Here, Scruton argues that architecture lost its way somewhere in the early 20th century by attempting to forge a new aesthetic style less dependent on classical and gothic features.[...]
The aim of the architectural aspect of such a war is to herald a ‘return’ to aesthetic order. This can mean two things. On the more moderate edge, the ‘return’ signifies the aesthetic move to a bygone era that divorces a building from its social context. This is visible in how Scruton’s commission suggests that the housing crisis is a problem solely of aesthetics, and that we can house more people if we build in an architectural vernacular more accustomed to a specifically-conceived ‘public’. This is a ridiculous claim, which ignores the bigger, structural problems of land, wealth, inequality and systemic oppression and exploitation that right-wing governments of the day at best wish not to address and at worst actively encourage. [...]
The proposal of Baudet and other right-wing thinkers to return to vernacular building traditions is as historically ill-informed as it is deplorable. This comes across in the form of basic errors. Watson, for instance, makes no distinction between the opposing styles of modernism and postmodernism. It also manifests in their lack of understanding of why the traditionalist style they favour took hold in the first place. During the nineteenth century, neoclassical, gothic and renaissance styles frequently masked the squalid living conditions and poor construction quality of newly-erected tenement houses in Europe’s industrial cities. Meanwhile, in places like Paris, the introduction of grand, classically-influenced architecture to the city’s centres was predicated on the displacement of millions of working-class people, and the destruction of centuries-old medieval buildings, much to the chagrin of contemporary conservationists.
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